> From: Georghiu, Christos <cg196@soton.ac.uk>
>
> Phin, maths is a man made phenomenon, hence if you are taught only part
> of the whole, this will be the part you will be able to deal with. It's
> like making up a game, not telling you all the rules and expecting you
> to be able to play it. Having some grasp of maths however it would
> probably be possible for you to grasp the problems and work out the
> meaning of the symbols given enough time and practice. So in a way I
> believe it is similar to the frame problem but does not indicate that
> we are cognitively bound by a "frame", just that we do not possess
> knowledge of all man made rule systems. Another example not being able
> to automatically understand all languages, you still have the ability
> to learn, so expand your "frame".
The reason it is symbol systems that have Frame Problems and not people
is NOT that people know it all; they don't. But the peculiarity of
the Frame Problem is that it keeps erupting for systems whose only form
of "knowledge" is symbols and symbol-manipulating rules (algorithms).
Such symbol systems are "brittle" in a way that we are not: How often
does it happened that you make a mistake that doesn't just amount to
getting something wrong on that occasion, but a mistake that makes
everything you have said and done up to that point wrong: a systematic
misunderstanding (or, rather NONunderstanding) to which we had
mistakenly given the benefit of the doubt (by interpreting it as
meaningful)?
The reason is that our knowledge is not just symbolic; it's grounded
in sensorimotor interactions with the world of objects that our
knowledge is about.
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